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2014 Kansas City Gameday HQ

but they only won one World Series.’ Yes,
World Series wins, obviously, are important
and we wish we’d won more. But I’ll argue
that winning 14 straight division titles, and
in Bobby’s case, you go back to Toronto, 15
straight division titles, that’s something that’s
never going to be done again. To be the guy
that led that says a lot about Bobby and how
good he was at getting his players to do
what he knew they were capable of doing
and doing it year after year. It was one thing
for us to win in ’91, when nobody expected
us to, another thing to win in ’92, when
we weren’t a Cinderella team anymore.
But to go out there and win year after year
when everybody’s expecting you to and
everybody’s wanting to knock you off, just
go ask the Washington Nationals how tough
it is to repeat. It’s a really, really difficult thing
to do and Bobby was the key guy in all of
that. He was such a calming influence in the
clubhouse, he was so great in getting the
most out of guys and also getting what was
expected out of guys. It’s one thing, either as
a team or as an individual, to have that kind
of breakthrough season. It’s another thing
to establish yourself as being capable of
doing that and then doing it year after year.
Bobby, both from an individual standpoint
and from a team standpoint, was able to get
guys to do that. It’s so much because of his
personality and how he treated guys and
how he went about his business and how he
expected us to go about our business.
GDHQ: What do you remember about
pitching against teams managed by Tony La
Russa and Joe Torre?
GLAVINE: Those are the guys you like playing against. Tony
always had the reputation of being that genius in the dugout,
that he was a great strategist and he was always trying to outmaneuver
the guy in the other dugout. From a player’s standpoint,
you knew that and you wanted to try and compete against that
and do what you could as an individual to take some of those
managerial options away from him. I don’t know Joe all that well,
but my sense is he’s an awful lot like Bobby. It seems like the guys
that played for Joe loved playing for him. They loved playing
for him because of the way he treated them and how he went
about his business with them. It just seems to me that he and
Bobby are very, very similar in that regard in terms of the respect
that the players had for them that played for them. It’s hard to
get everybody to like you as a manager but it seems to me that
when you’re talking about Bobby and Joe, you’re talking about
the high-90 percentile of guys who enjoyed playing for them and
that says a lot.
ROB KIM/GETTY IMAGES
GDHQ: What do you remember about Frank Thomas? Did you
ever get to face him?
GLAVINE: I did face him. We had a little bit of interaction in
interleague play. Ed Note: Thomas and Glavine went head to
head in one Interleague game, on June 21, 2002, when the Atlanta
Braves beat the Chicago White Sox, 3-2, at Turner Field. Thomas
went 1-for-1 off Glavine, a sixth-inning single, with two walks in
three plate appearances. Glavine pitched seven innings and left
with a 2-1 lead, but got no decision, thanks to Thomas’ gametying
RBI double in the eighth. I always liked Frank as a person.
Watching him play and not really knowing him, I liked how he
went about his business. He was never a guy that you looked
at and rolled your eyes when you heard him say something.
He seemed to be a straightforward guy and a fierce competitor.
When I had the opportunity to meet him this winter when the
announcements came out, he was everything that my perception
of him was and more. As we were talking about with me earlier,
having had an opportunity to look at Frank’s numbers now, he
was a lot better player than I thought he was. I can tell you that.